This week on Written in Uncertainty I’m discussing one of the most talked about individuals in The Elder Scrolls lore, someone who has been a god, a mortal, a general, a poet, a liar and possibly a whore. Today we’re asking, who is Vivec?
I want to say, as usual, that this is my own understanding of who Vivec is, and definitely not the whole truth of the matter. Much of what Vivec has done and said makes determining the full truth entirely impossible, and possibly not desirable either, so this is not the final word.
I will be referencing some of C0DA, so prior warning if you’re bothered about precise canon. I’ll be noting where the sources come from as I talk through them, so feel free to disregard any you don’t think are relevant.
Vivec in Brief, and Hir Problems
Vivec was, or maybe is, in brief, a mortal who became a god, one of the Tribunal who ruled Morrowind for more than three and a half thousand years. Ze was the Warrior-Poet of the Tribunal, and along with the rest of them tapped the Heart of Lorkhan to become gods, in a point called the Red Moment by the fans and in a few texts. He also potentially, probably, has CHIM, a state of enlightenment within The Elder Scrolls. I will be going over some of that here, but have already done a fuller treatment of CHIM. Go check that out if you haven’t already and want to get a handle on that concept that is explained almost entirely by Vivec.
As a poet, however, ze is also one of the biggest liars in TES. Hir 36 Lessons are some of the biggest pieces of propaganda you’ll find in TES, although it’s not immediately obvious. It’s just crazy on a first read through. Exactly who Vivec is and what ze has done and how have several different answers in TES, and you’ll get widely different opinions on it. I remember seeing a thread a few years ago on the old Bethesda forums, entitled Vivec? god? CHIM? Jerk? What?, and immediately thinking “all of the above”.
Part of that has come from how Vivec has been developed as a character. Vivec’s spoken dialogue in The Elder Scrolls III was written by one developer (I think Ken Rolston??), and Michael Kirkbride wrote the 36 Lessons. Those different authors had different voices, resulting in quite a large tone difference in how Vivec is developed. ESO, with its emphasis on the more spiritual, rather than ceremonial, worship in the Tribunal, puts another layer of voices on Vivec, meaning that we have many different ways to approach the character.
Vivec and Duality
Which is entirely appropriate, given that Vivec is all about duality and, to a lesser degree, uncertainty. There’s the dual aspect of warrior and poet, male and female, which for me is key to hir whole character. Vivec is a liminal being, something that exists in the in-between state. Given that, I’m a little surprised that Vivec isn’t explicitly a psychopomp in the Tribunal faith. That is, a being that takes souls from the place of the living to the place of the dead. Existing in both states at once seems to be entirely in Vivec’s wheelhouse. But that’s just my personal beef.
Vivec’s role as Mastery in the Tribunal is also really reflective of this duality. In the 36 Lessons, the Number of the Master is 11, 1 and 1. It’s the Observer position in the enantiomorph, the rule that holds both the rebel and the king in balance and then makes one the victor and one the vanquished. To be able to choose and decide which is which requires an intimate knowledge of both, and thereby mastery over them.
This is a little at odds with Vivec’s overall position in the Tribunal, as Sotha Sil is the Mage, which is the traditional Observer role. However, everything else about Vivec screams that ze is the one in the middle, which is closer to the Observer role, and what we’ll run with for now.
Reflective of that duality, Vivec states in hir Trial that:
“Vehk the mortal did murder the Hortator.
Vehk the God did not, and remains as written.
And yet these two are the same being. And yet are not, save for one red moment.
Vivec is both Vehk and Vehk, murderer and innocent, and they met in the liminal space that is the Red Moment. Or Vivec could be a lying murderer trying to cover up hir own wrongdoing with flowery language and a faked metaphysical event. Which is it? That’s up to us to decide, in our own liminal space where it could be either. Truth, as we’ll see later, is something that Vivec is not necessarily particularly invested in.
It’s also quite common that Vivec is called selfish, and potentially with reason in some ways. Vivec did clearly break hir oath to Nerevar, and the Tribunal Temple was an artificial construction created around the Tribunal. The Temple certainly puts a rather too rosy picture of what Vivec has done, but I’m not sure that we can see enough about hir motives. Ze has striven for self-transformation in whatever ze has done, and in the actions against Nerevar, all accounts consider Vivec to have goaded Nerevar to war. However, we have multiple accounts of hir regret at the act of killing Nerevar, and ze also says ze regrets breaking hir oath, as well. If we can take that at face value, it’s likely that Vivec is not simply power-crazed, but has an “ends justifies the means” outlook. This is especially prominent if C0DA is taken into account, as Vivec at the very least manipulated Jubal into helping hir, and also possibly set Numidium’s return in motion through offering the golem to Tiber Septim.
Vivec’s Origins
As a result, there are multiple versions of where Vivec could have come from. The 36 Lessons, or at least the first 36, portray hir as being birthed from an egg, with Almalexia and Sotha Sil as parent figures that have a hand in creating and shaping it. This presents the Tribunal as a whole as a thing that is self-created, and Vivec in particular is something that is possibly the culmination of the Tribunal, being both the youngest Tribune and the one able to balance both Mystery and Mercy. This has Vivec as the ‘egg’ of the Tribunal that was incubated by a netchiman’s wife, that is a shepherd’s wife.
In addition to being a humble beginning, this is important because, as the Selectives Lorecast has pointed out, the creation of this egg is deliberate, and happens without the normal processes. Sermon 1 of the 36 Lessons actually says that “Ayem took a netchiman’s wife”, and then seemingly spoke Vehk into being by declaring that ze was inside her as an egg.
This is creation and birth without desire, which separates the birth from mortal concerns. It also makes it more of a blank slate, and therefore able to self-create and be without the context of having parents. This is something that several Western Hermetic traditions pick up on, as well as a key tenet in Existentialist philosophy – while we are not placed into the world without a context, to act as we see fit and without the influences of those contexts is often placed on a higher plane. To paraphrase a reply by Satre to a moral quandary one of his students was in, “You are free, so choose. That is to say, invent.” That freedom to choose, independent of , existentialist radical freedom, is key to Vivec’s character, which I’ll get to later.
In terms of how Vivec rises to prominence, ze is then spotted by Nerevar as something important, either on the road to Mournhold or in Mournhold itself, and raised up by him to be an advisor against the invading Nords. In the 36 Lessons’ telling, Nerevar is a mercenary captain, who then decides to follow Vivec.
We have a much more grounded version of Vivec’s origins in the unlicensed text What My Beloved Taught Me. Ze describes hirself there as “A gutter-get, a daggerlad, a netchiman’s son” who lives in alleyways and the streets of Mournhold. From that text, it seems like ze is talking to Nerevar about a variety of things, which is possibly where they met in this version of events. The 36 Lessons has them meeting, in a way at least, on the way to Mournhold.
What My Beloved Taught Me also has Vivec as a hermaphrodite from the beginning, the line “I was born a whelp-wench in my under”. There seems to be no account where Vivec has a conventional gender to begin with, whatever way its spun, which in a way incapsulates Vivec’s attitude, I feel. Ze was always meant to be everything, as ze was always both. That’s also why I’m using “ze”, by the way, rather than he or she. Vivec has been described as both in various places, I want to cover all possibilities here.
Sermon 37 is why I say only the first 36 of the 36 Lessons portray Vivec as being birthed from an egg. Sermon 37 seems to take something of a more conventional view, some of the time. That text presents a series of ‘could-have-beens’ for Vivec, which relate Vivec’s pasts as possibly becoming a troubadour and dying of a fever. Or at least that’s my reading of it; I could be entirely wrong there.
Vivec and Godhood
So how did Vivec get the point of changing hir past and manipulating time? That’s a little confusing, as it could be multiple things. Of course it could, it’s Vivec. Along with Almalexia and Sotha Sil, Vivec became a god through tapping the Heart of Lorkhan with Kagrenac’s Tools, following the Battle of Red Mountain. That allowed Vivec to channel the power of the Heart to hir own ends. It’s either that power that allowed the manipulation of time, or that of CHIM.
Vivec does seem to have quite a dismissive opinion of gods in general. Hir dialogue in TES III says that “I still see no compelling reason to worship any of the Aedra or Daedra”. This would certainly go some way to explain Vivec’s actions during hir Trial.
Ze does seem to have an ambivalent relationship with Sithis, at least if ze is the author of the book Sithis, which references the Sermons and talks about Sithis in very similar ways. It seems to value Sithis as a thing that shapes the universe, that brings great benefits and is praiseworthy, but not necessarily something to be worshipped. Sermon 21 of the 36 Lessons declares that “the only name of God” is “I”, the self that can become the Amaranth. We don’t know for sure that this is Vivec’s precise outlook, but it would fit with the metaphysics that Vivec seems to espouse.
Vivec is one of two people we know of who could have CHIM. I did a cast on the concept itself a while back, so listen to/read that if you want to understand more about that topic itself. For now it’s enough to say that CHIM possibly gives those who achieve it the power to reshape reality. If Vivec had it, then ze could certainly manipulate hir past so that ze was always a god, and account that we have in the 36 Lessons becomes true.
However, there is also the manipulation of the Heart of Lorkhan that gave Vivec hir godhood. It’s pretty much impossible to separate out that from the benefits of CHIM, so we can’t know for sure whether Vivec has it. We also have it that the worship of the people powered the Tribunal’s maintenance of the Great Ghostfence, so it is possible that that gave Vivec and the other Triunes the power to hold up the Ghostfence, and possibly perform other feats. So quite what we can attribute to CHIM itself is an open question.
However, the 36 Lessons also give us the best account we have of how to attain CHIM. Despite that, we don’t know precisely when Vivec would have got it. There’s a line in Sermon 4 where Vivec drinks the milk of a folded bone of the earth and “became a ruling king of the world”. A lot of the descriptions in the 36 Lessons link being a Ruling King to attaining CHIM, so it’s possible that it happened here. However, the common consensus seems to be that it happened later, during an event called the Pomegranate Banquet in Sermon 14. This is because Bal actually says “CHIM” in the text, one of only two times it’s in the Lessons.
I think there are possibly two things going on here. The first of those being that Vivec is acknowledging that hir divinity, rather than CHIM, in Sermon 4. There is a reference to “the heart bone” in Sermon 11, which is a clear reference to Lorkhan’s heart, in my view. If the Heart can be considered a bone, then folding it and drinking its milk could be an oblique reference to the use of Kagrenac’s Tools on the Heart. Given that, it feels like Bal may have helped Vivec attain CHIM during the Pomegranate Banquet. And yes, this is almost the bit where we get to talk about all that spear-biting.
This does actually fit, because CHIM, according to Vehk’s Teaching is, to quote, “to transcend mortal boundaries”. In order to learn how to move beyond limitation, you need to first be limited. Vivec is willingly submitting to the domination of Bal in order to learn how to move beyond limits imposed on hir. In so doing, ze possibly attains CHIM.
This also has some implications about why worship the Daeda, but I think that probably deserves its own episode, as it’s a question that I see around a lot.
The 36 Lessons are, if they are written by Vivec, possibly a manual on how to attain CHIM, if you listen to various parts of the community. There are several “lessons of ruling kings” scattered throughout the books, but as usual, I’m not 100% convinced that these are necessarily to do with CHIM. The “lessons of ruling kings” given don’t seem to necessarily marry up with Vivec’s own actions, for starters. They do however contain a few points relating to the enantiomorph and the godhead, which are necessary parts of attaining CHIM. So it’s likely that it’s a manual in some ways, but it’s a little difficult to tease out. It’s certainly not their only purpose, I think.
There are elements in the Lessons that imply that Vivec wrote them for the Nerevarine. There are quite a few references in there that hint at the Lessons being a warning and instruction manual for what Vivec is doing with the Nerevarine. Most notably these passages in Sermon 13:
“’The ruling king is to stand against me and then before me. He is to learn from my punishment. I will mark him to know. He is to come as male or female. I am the form he must acquire.”
And
“If there is to be an end I must be removed. The ruling king must know this, and I will test him. I will murder him time and again until he knows this.”
The first of these is a reference to choosing the player character’s gender at character creation, as well as a nod to Vivec’s dual sexual nature. The second point, of murdering the ruling king again and again, is a reference to the failed Incarnates, in my view. Vivec and the Ordinators have been killing all the Nerevarines to make sure that the Nerevarine eventually knows that Vivec must be removed. Strictly speaking, this implies that the Nerevarine that is the player character in The Elder Scrolls III is the same as Peakstar, Conoon Chodala and the rest, having “learned their lesson”. Or it’s just a nod to the idea of dying again and again in the game until you complete the main quest. The first of these is tricky as it means that there was literal reincarnation of souls going on, which I’m not sure is strictly a thing in The Elder Scrolls; where things are “brought back”, it’s typically through the process of mantling, rather than reincarnation. Mantling, in brief, is where you imitate the actions of a thing to the extent that the universe can’t tell the difference between you. There are some hints that something like more traditional reincarnation is possible, but rather than go down that rabbit hole I’ll leave you with this quote from MK on the matter, originally posted in a forum in 2005, speaking as Nu-Hatta:
Mantling and incarnation are separate roads; do not mistake this. The latter is built from the cobbles of drawn-bone destiny. The former: walk like them until they must walk like you.
Now I’ve dropped that little piece on you, I’ll leave you to think on what the cobbles of draw-bone destiny could be, and leave it until we can have a whole podcast on the nature of souls in TES.
Having established that Vivec has been killing the Nerevar over and over until they become what they need to be, I think it’s probably time we talked about Vivec and Nerevar a bit more explicitly.
Vivec and Nerevar
We don’t know precisely how Vivec and Nerevar met. The 36 Lessons has Nerevar meeting Vivec on the road to Mournhold as part of a merchant caravan. However, what we know of Nerevar’s history, as a war leader in House Indoril, makes that unlikely. Why would a noble and a general be serving in a caravan? I don’t imagine House Indoril would promote a mere mercenary quite that high.
The Selectives’ Vivec podcast has a good number of perspectives on how Vivec is likely to have got Nerevar’s attention. Check that out for a good number of possibilities. The other likely possibility from What My Beloved Taught Me seems to be that Vivec is a guttersnipe-cum-whore that strikes up conversation with Nerevar. From there, we can possibly assume they strike up a relationship (of some sort, either friendship or possibly sexual), and from there Vivec becomes an advisor to Nerevar. If that is true, it’s likely that Vivec met the other members of the Tribunal as part of Nerevar’s court; they were members of Chimer nobility, and likely already part of what would become the First Council.
Vivec’s whole attitude towards Nerevar is interesting. Ze seems ambivalent about the whole thing. On the one hand, Nerevar is a treasured friend in many ways, who Vivec seems to regret killing. On the other, Nerevar is someone who was disposable as part of the grand plan that Vivec had for the Chimer/Dunmer. I think that both of these are likely true, given that Vivec in both ESO and Morrowind seems to be heavy with regret. There’s a sense of dreadful purpose in some ways with Vivec, that hir attitude to Nerevar encapsulates better than anything else.
Vivec’s Golden Path
I think it’s definitely something that Vivec had in mind for the Chimer and Dunmer. In particular there’s this quote from Sermon 35:
Later, and by that I mean much, much later, my reign will be seen as an act of the highest love, which is a return from the astral destiny and the marriages between. By that I mean the catastrophes, which will come from all five corners.
This feels like Vivec anticipates either leading hir people through a range of catastrophes, or that ze will cause them. I think, given the Red Year, it may well be the latter.
There’s also a bit more to this quote that I think links this element of The Elder Scrolls to the Dune series, particularly God-Emperor of Dune. In that, Emperor Leto II had planned a “Golden Path” for humanity, which resulted in a millennia-long theocratic rule across the galaxy, that stagnated and centralised galactic culture to the point where it was shattered on his death, and the remnants of a rejuvenated humanity were scattered among the stars.
To me, this feels very like the Tribunal and Morrowind. The Tribunal ruled a theocratic nation for thousands of years, that was then scattered across Tamriel by a cataclysm following the death or disappearance of the Tribunal and the Red Year. Part of the Dune story later concerns the return of some of those scattered humans to those that stayed behind, a “return from astral destiny”. I may be reading far too much into this, but I think that Vivec intentionally left Lie Rock to fall and destroy Vivec City, in order to make hir people ready for a future without the Tribunal. Or potentially for Landfall.
We’re now going down a bit of a rabbit-hole, so bear with me.
In Michael Kirkbride’s C0DA, the Numidium returns in the ninth century of the Fifth Era and destroys much of Nirn in an event called Landfall. The Dunmer are one of two races that we know survived the event on a moon colony, and then goes on to produce Jubal lun-Sul, who Vivec later marries and produces the Amaranth with. I think it’s possible that Vivec was preparing for those catastrophes by intentionally making them happen. Remember that, as part of the Armistice with the Empire, Vivec gives Tiber the Numidium. I think it’s possible that Vivec gave the Numidium knowing that it would be reactivated and that it would cause Landfall; that the suffering and extinction of many on Nirn was seen by Vivec as a prerequisite for bringing about the Amaranth.
This would also imply that Vivec was effectively “grooming” Jubal for the purpose, and has some rather interesting implications for hir relationship with Nerevar. Jubal is considered by some fans to effectively be a Nerevarine, because he takes similar steps to the Nerevarine over the course of C0DA’s storyline.
This does actually include wanting to kill him. MK has hinted that Vivec was also Hlaalu Hir in C0DA (“hir” being a huge clue), who tries to kill Jubal in C0DA’s narrative. If you want to check out my thoughts on C0DA in general, which goes over some of this, check out my previous cast on that topic. What’s important here is that if Jubal is a Nerevarine, then it’s possible that Vivec engineered the whole thing of the Nerevarine to be a redemption “engine”, maybe, for Tamriel.
Or maybe that’s giving Vivec too much credit. It’s also possible that, if Jubal is a Nerevarine, that Vivec is still desperately trying to make up for hir killing of Nerevar, even several eras later. But again, that’s a problem with Vivec; hir actions can be spun so many different ways, and with the entire Temple basically endeavouring to make hir look good. This has also often been in spite of very real evidence that Vivec is a sinister individual who has people murdered. This includes Nerevar, but is also a general perception. We have this from Vivec and Mephala:
The Dunmer do not envision Lord Vivec as a creature of murder, sex, and secrets. Rather, they conceive of Lord Vivec as benevolent king, guardian warrior, poet-artist. But, at the same time, unconsciously, they accept the notion of darker, hidden currents beneath Vivec’s benevolent aspects.
For example, one of the most striking persistent myths associated with Vivec is the story that Vivec conspired with his co-rulers Almalexia and Sotha Sil in the murder of Lord Nerevar, the greatest of Dunmer heroes and generals. The story is derived from Ashlander oral tradition, and is flatly contradicted by all Temple traditions. Nonetheless, the tale is firmly established in the Dunmer imagination, as if to say, “Of course Vivec would never have conspired to murder Lord Nerevar, but it happened so long ago… who can know the truth?”
This brings us back to duality again, and whether Vivec did or did not murder Nerevar. Vivec can never provide one answer or the other, but instead offers both as a solution. This is reflective of hir Anticipation in Mephala, but also in his attitude to truth.
Vivec and Truth
The Lessons repeatedly present certainty as a bad thing, and truth as a problem. Well, not necessarily a “problem”, but a blunt weapon. We have part of the Numidium “destroyed in the manner of truth: by a great hammering” in Sermon 36, and Sermon 21 stating: “Truth is like my husband: instructed to smash, filled with procedure and noise, hammering, weighty, heaviness made schematic, lessons learned only by a mace.” In contrast, Vivec consistently refers to both hirself and what the Nerevarine must become as “a letter written in uncertainty”, that in-between state that is not necessarily true or untrue.
It’s also down to hir nature as a poet, who, to quote a phrase, use lies to tell the truth. Truth is therefore a tool to achieve Vivec’s goals. We also have this statement about Vivec from Sotha Sil in ESO, which I think possibly sheds light on Vivec’s motives a little:
Vivec craves radical freedom – the death of all limits and restrictions. He wishes to be all things at all times. Every race, every gender, every hero, both divine and finite… but in the end, he can only be Vivec.
The notion of radical freedom is what allows the choice in Existentialism we talked about earlier; the idea that it’s only yourself that is holding you back from throwing yourself off a cliff or running naked through the Arctic. The realisation is that a person can do and be many things, but does not approach many of those things for reasons that they barely acknowledge. Vivec wanting to do and be everything speaks to a very similar way of expressing this, particularly when we think about the Amaranth, that is becoming the seed of a new universe.
If you want more information on that, I have covered the Amaranth in a previous podcast, but I want to dip into Vivec’s relationship to it here. In one of the quotes describing Amaranth, MK describes the one that achieves it as one that “wails knowing free will”, which is that radical freedom. Vivec craves that, and thereby potentially craves Amaranth. The New Whirling School has also pointed out that Sermon 18 is where Vivec realises hir fundamental limits and nature, as well as actively discouraging others to follow in hir footsteps. I’ve seen several people say this is when ze realises that ze cannot obtain Amaranth. Although, if we track the real-world development of Vivec, I’m sure I remember seeing a comment by MK that he didn’t have a clear conception of the Amaranth when he wrote the 36 Lessons, so I’m not sure that this is Amaranth as such rather than an expression of the idea of dharma, that a person or thing needs to follow what they were destined to be. Vivec needs to be Vivec and do what Vivec does, rather than what others can do, which is possible for those with radical freedom.
Vehk’s Teaching speaks out this in relation to the attitude of how ancestor worship can lead towards the Amaranth. Not all of this is immediately relevant to Vivec’s attitude to truth, but I think provides some context for the closing remarks on it, which certainly are. To quote:
The arbitrary and the motivated in regarding one’s divine ancestors: ignoring a manifest concern for belief in them as us, instead we concern ourselves with intensity and its relationship with action, valorizing ‘little narratives’ and proliferation of narratives in our native cultures to the point that there is no perch from extraneous content. Pure subjectivity is no longer possible; instead it becomes akin to sensory deprivation, yet without the fear, for we sense things that remind us of the dawn: the sacrifice into the stabilizing bones, new-built towers with broken intentions, and first metals gone blue from exposure to the long sun. The quest toward the ur-you for certainty and foundations is not innocent. However, it is an honest vindication for truth and superhuman ideals, which means it should be regarded as such by our own sense of fault: we made this, we dreamed this, we made it viable by voting with our seductions, we will live again to show our genuine applause.
In this passage, Vivec is essentially claiming that one’s cultural context impinges on the self heavily, to the point where the self is not really self; one cannot be purely subjective, but instead an aggregation of little narratives. That means that, when we want our own truth, we are excising the very things we are made of, and so nothing is left, nothing to navigate by, which results in something like sensory deprivation. So in that way, truth and the true nature of the self leads to Amaranth. I think.
Another element of that radical freedom could potentially also be that Vivec wants to be a Prisoner, wants to be a player character. They can be anything, and do anything, within the cosmos of The Elder Scrolls. But Vivec can only be Vivec – not a new universe, not one that moves beyond it. One that contains multiple elements of things, but cannot contain them all to the extent of being a totality. For that, ze needs Jubal.
But I now want to talk a bit more about a totality that Vivec is in hirself; male and female. It’s a bit that the fans tend to get a little excited about, because it basically involves a lot of dick-waving. Yes, we’re going to talk about MUATRA.
MUATRA, Or Mystical Dick-Waving as Therapy
MUATRA is Vivec’s “spear”, and also a representation of hir sexual organs. Most people associate it with Vivec’s penis, but it’s not just that. The name that it’s given should be an indication, too; MUATRA is called Milk-Taker, and if anything, a penis would be a milk giver. MUATRA is a representation of Vivec as a hermaphrodite, and as such takes milk as well, performing the role of a receptacle, which is the feminine vagina, uterus and womb.
This construction is very similar to the Hindu idea of yoni and linga, the female and male representations of Shiva and Shakti. MK has noted Shiva in particular as a large inspiration for how he sees Vivec, and I think this is one of those big areas. Shiva and Shakti’s merging symbolises union and recreation, as well as being symbols of those gods themselves. That portrayal of the two beings in constant unity is what Vivec represents in one being.
I’ve also seen MUATRA the spear presented as a dancing pole, against which female sexuality is displayed. I’m not 100% sure on that one, but it’s one way of making the spear symbol less immediately phallic.
MUATRA may also represent part of Vivec’s power as a poet; that is, seduction. Seducing with words is something that poets do, and something that can be done to anyone, hence MUATRA being both male and female in its application.
It could also be an expression of a repressed past. MUATRA is an anagram for TRAUMA, after all. It also doesn’t receive its name until after Vivec’s encounter with the King of Rape in Sermon 14. Vivec already has a “spear”, it’s just not named. I’ve seen several people claim that Vivec was potentially traumatised as a child, which is why ze ran away to Mournhold and has no father in the 36 Lessons. However, given what we talked about earlier, it sounds like there was an element of willingness to submit to Bal, for hir own reasons. I think this is part of why people worship Daedra at all, but that really needs its own cast.
Bal and Vivec’s Children
The 36 Lessons also mentioned that Vivec and Molag Bal had children. Exactly what they are and what they represent is uncertain, with some thinking that they wind up as Daedric demiprinces. However, I don’t have much truck with that, as they don’t seem to act much like Daedra, and Sermon 18 lists Vivec as one of hir own children. I’ve heard it said that the Children are elements of Vivec’s own personality that ze was shedding in the process of becoming a deity. One of them is explicitly called out as being Vivec hirself. That, of course, assumes that Vivec became a god by way of something other than simply meddling with a dead god’s heart, but it’s at least a metaphorical possibility.
I also have a pet theory that the destruction of Vivec and Bal’s children is a metaphor for the Tribunal’s reshaping of Dunmer culture. We get there by way of numbers.
Molag Bal and Vivec have 9 children. The Anticipations and the House of Troubles represent 7 Daedra. Together, that makes 16, or the total number of Daedric Princes, not counting the weirdness of Jyggalag. I think that the killing of the children is possibly a metaphor for Vivec reshaping Chimeri/Dunmeri society into something that ze wants, getting rid of any worship of Sanguine, Vaermina and the rest of them.
And that’s about all I have to say about Vivec. Ze is one of the most enigmatic characters in TES, and several people before me have put some fantastic thought pieces on hir nature, goals and intentions. I’d urge you to have a poke around the old Bethesda forums, the teslore subreddit and elsewhere for some more fantastic perspectives on how Vivec can be perceived. Ze may have been a git, but I can’t escape the thought that ze was a git with a plan, that we can only really see the half of.
And… that’s all for this week. I’ll be back in 2 weeks with a look into Sotha Sil, and an audio-only look at the Cyrodilic Mononyth, Shezarr’s Song.
Until then, this podcast remains a letter written in uncertainty.
